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>i wish the media wanted to tackle this and examine what is >going on psychologically/clinically with a large portion of >the country cuz its deeper than just polarization/tribalism.
Fantasyland How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History Kurt Andersen
http://www.randomhousebooks.com/books/209776/
Also wrote a long piece in the Atlantic about it, makes some pretty compelling arguments I think:
How America Lost Its Mind The nation’s current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional throughout its history.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/
too long to swipe but here's a summary:
Washington, D.C. (August 8, 2017)—Long before alternative facts, the upheavals of the 1960s started loosening the country’s grip on reality. And it’s that tumultuous era—when anything and everything became believable—that explains the rise of Donald Trump.
This is How America Went Haywire. As Kurt Andersen argues in the cover story of The Atlantic’s new September issue, the country has mutated into Fantasyland. Being American means we can believe anything we want; our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. What’s happening now in politics is just the ultimate expression of this mind-set. Andersen has written that Donald Trump tapped into an American vulnerability for conspiracy theories and “took advantage of the transformation of the GOP (and of presidential politics into show business) to become fantasist-in-chief. Trump lies shamelessly and compulsively, and because politicians in general fib and dissemble, his supporters excuse that.”
Today, two-thirds of Americans believe that angels and demons exist; a third believe that climate change is a hoax; almost a quarter believe that vaccines cause autism; only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. According to Kurt Andersen, the election of Donald Trump revealed that a critical mass of Americans has become untethered from reality—a drift that traces its origin to the 1960s, “the big-bang moment for truthiness.” As Andersen sees it, a number of factors have led Americans—both on the elite left and the populist right—to give ourselves over to all kinds of magical thinking, anything-goes relativism, and belief in fanciful explanation. How did we get to be like this? Andersen argues that this great unbalancing was the product of two momentous changes: a profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the ’60s, when anything and everything became believable, and today’s information era, which empowers real-seeming fantasies of the ideological, religious, and scientific kinds. People see our shocking Trump moment—an era of post-truth and “alternative facts”—as some inexplicable and crazy new American phenomenon. But what’s happening is just the ultimate extrapolation and expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional for its entire history. Writes Andersen: “Trump doesn’t like experts, because they interfere with his right as an American to believe or pretend that fictions are facts.”
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Mar-A-Lago delenda est
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